


Drowning/Burning

by watername



Series: The Force and the 'Verse [2]
Category: Firefly, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 11:42:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4665255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watername/pseuds/watername
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alderaan and Shadow weren't nothing but twins born 20 years apart. Firefly/Star Wars fusion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drowning/Burning

Mal dreamt of Shadow for weeks after news of Alderaan broke. His mama and the ranch hands that raised him – he sees them in his mind’s eye like the specters he knows they’re not. They are too solid to touch, and all around him is the land he grew on as stubborn as a weed. Shadow was a home, if a hard one, and now it’s ash and dust and smoke. No one’s set foot to it in the 20 years since the Empire blacked out the sky with ships and laid bombs like eggs, fertilized it with gunfire.

Shadow cracked beneath its’ people’s feet when it died, and its corpse is still out there. He avoids it on every run he takes, and when he can’t _Serenity_ feels like the air’s seeping out somewhere. The first week Kaylee was on board she nearly fretted herself sick trying to fix the problem before Zoe took her aside and explained that the problem couldn’t bear fixing. It was just something the ship would have to live with for the rest of her days.

Alderaan broke when they were halfway across the ‘verse, split into millions of pieces with all its folk. Mal had known that Shadow wasn’t an act of war since his mind first went fiery with a vision of the planet’s surface as it burned. It was seared into him as a scar on his heart that it had been an act of peace and reason and logic, and those peace-minders that killed millions would do it again, and never once doubt their peaceableness.

He avoided Inara even more in the days that followed.

It had been only a little while since she had come onboard. So sure she was, that he would take her on – feeling his thoughts like skin only inches from her. He hadn’t given her the right – and he pushed back, touched on that hard and cold determination to get _away_ that was masked in front of him in perfume and silk. He could still remember how she had started, and folded in and away as neatly as origami.

“Do we have a deal?” she said, words from her own mouth.

“We do,” he tightly said, turning away and calling back as he left. “Don’t bother crawling in my head no more. I’m sure you’ll get better coin with those fine Empire men crawling in your bed.”

One month since she come onboard, with her governmental-approved lifestyle. One month and one day later, Alderaan is nothing more than space debris.

One month and four days, it’s late in the night, as far as they can figure. He’s woke because nothing can make him want to sleep right now. Woke and thinking and his no-good _go shi_ sense can feel that Inara’s wake too, and alone. Muttering curses to himself, he got himself dressed and walked down the corridor, paused outside her door.

“ _Go away.”_

She hasn’t mucked in his head since she first came on board, and he had almost let go of that first instance, but he’s not in a mood to be messed with. His ship, his shuttlecraft, and he will go back and find her rent for the month (paid in shiny, unused coin) and throw it in first if he has to. But he won’t go back.

His hand pressed down on the button to open the door, and he found Inara facing away from him, breathing in and out as the candle in front of her shrunk and grew in perfect synch. He’d never seen her do this out right, and gratitude, unasked for, blankets around him. He has made it a habit to never do anything by mind he can’t do by hand, and it’s unnerving to see someone do with perfect mastery what he’s made a promise to avoid.

“I said go away.”

“No, you thought very loudly go away. You want to tell me to go away, you tell me to my face.”

She turned around and there were tears in her eyes, ready and poised to drop onto her cheeks.

“Go away,” she said quietly, but with force.

“No.”

She stepped closer to him, and he saw one lonesome drop at the corner of her eye, sink and trail onto her skin. The rest refused to follow.

“Did you want to see me like this? Did you want to see if I felt it?” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, and she stared at him. “I wanted to see you feel it because I’m feeling it, and it’s now twice that a planetfull had people die in earshot millions of miles away. So, yes. What are you feeling?”

Her face crumpled, and she turned away from him.

“Go away,” she repeated softly, and she sat on her bed in finery and wept.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

 Alderaan burned over and over in her head.

She was trained for the person. She had learned the skills and meanings of the individual, and could measure out their heart in the palm of her hand.  She did not know the meanings of millions, pushed down on her in one swell.  

As a child, she had nearly drowned once. Her training as a companion swept the memory out her almost entirely, but almost was not enough now. She felt once again what it was like to have light, air, life just out of reach. To feel nothing beneath your feet as you searched and pleaded with the universe for support. Her mind, going to blackness, and shrinking until it was the smallest, most futile thing in the sea. Alderaan’s people were the ocean, and she was nothing but a mote.

She opened her eyes to see all the candles in her shuttle flickering into nothingness.

She prayed with all her heart that she be given the gift to do the same.


End file.
